Saul and Patsy (17 page)

“Maybe it just slipped out,” Saul said. Dennis Peterson had segued to another story about Derby Days in downtown Five Oaks, and then the phone started to ring.

“I thought you looked pretty good, Saul,” Karla said. “You acquitted yourself very well.” She clapped her hands several times in his direction, a form of applause. A few other people in the room also applauded. “Hear, hear,” they said.

The party broke up half an hour later.

At two-fifteen, Saul was lying in bed with Patsy. “I can’t sleep,” he said.

“I know.” She opened and shut her mouth quickly, realized that the nighttime epigram she was about to utter was not particularly clever, and was in the wrong key, besides.

They lay there together. It was a warm night, and they touched each other lightly, back to back.

“Do you feel it?” Saul asked. “He hasn’t gone away.”

“What do you mean?”

Saul looked up toward the ceiling in exasperation. “He’s still here,” he said. “Can’t you tell?”

Yes, of course she could tell. Yes, indeed. He still was. It would take more than a bullet to put an end to him, but she would be careful not to say so.

Eleven

A day begins, sunny, the hint of a breeze, a relief from the stillness of the day before. The baby—really, her infancy is over, and the world is registering on her in complex patterns of light and sound—the baby is standing in her crib uttering greet-the-world noises, vocalizations. She practices her scat-singing. In the bedroom across the hall, her parents ponder the possibility of making love—the husband, who has not slept, staring at the ceiling, and the wife, who has slept very well indeed but who has a headache from a beer she drank just before she went to bed, studying the bedside clock, though she already knows the time. The encounter, if it happens, would be quick. This does not have to be said. No profound emotions would be exchanged, no virtuoso gestures; it would be like coughing: a relief for the moment, an analgesic against other urges and irritations. But after one or two tentative caresses on the arm, the back, the buttocks, they move away from each other. The spaces between them could be measured in millimeters, infinitesimal spaces expressing an inexpressible failure of desire. Neither one wants to hurt the other’s feelings, and they both take great care to be physically tactful. Arising out of the drudgery of sleep, the wife (Patsy) is preoccupied with her dreams, her daughter in the next room, and a slight and casual indifference to her husband’s body, an indifference that is new to her, and the husband (Saul) is preoccupied with death. He is, to use an antique word, heartsick. Morning sex will not cure it. Sex, today, would make it worse.

The measure of this particular marriage is that each one knows the other’s thoughts. Day after day, the possibility of a private language between them is established and maintained. No private language, the wife thinks, no marriage.

The wife tosses aside the sheet and marches into the bathroom. She splashes water on her face. Then she brushes her teeth, enjoying the taste, like candied goo, of the toothpaste, a sunrise taste. After rinsing her mouth out and watching the water swirl down the drain that is beginning to be clogged with her husband’s beard stubble, she searches in the medicine cabinet for the aspirin, pushing aside the antidepressants to get at it. She takes two caplets, then lowers her cupped hands to the running water. As she drinks the water, she notices that her toenails will soon need clipping. She looks at her face in the mirror and thinks of the word “haggard,” because that is what she expected to be but is not. She looks pretty great, all things considered. Her eyes glow with intelligence and clarity, the dream-life and the headache fading out of them now that she is standing up. Her beauty—and she can recognize this—originates from her eyes. It flows out from there. The rest of her body is secondary, a problem in geometry, a dancer’s problem.

Back in the bedroom, she stretches her clasped arms and twists her head back and forth to loosen the neck muscles. She lowers herself to the floor to perform her leg-raises, sit-ups, and more stretch exercises before she stands and walks over to the phone. She calls a special number at the bank to say she will not be coming in to work. Family emergency. Of course everyone at the bank will already know about Gordy Himmelman’s death. In fact, the secretary to whom she speaks passes on her sympathies. Patsy hardly needs to call. After hanging up, she pads into the nursery to greet Mary Esther, nuzzle her, change her, and take her down to the kitchen for breakfast. Her daughter screech-sings happily when she first sees her mother.

As Patsy’s mother used to say, following any event contaminated by sorrow, “Life goes on.”

The husband hears his wife’s light footsteps as she descends the stairs. Before he rises, he leans over to sniff her pillow to detect her mood. The smell on the pillow is businesslike, a female version of getting-on-with-things. How does he know this, how does he know he isn’t imagining, right there on the borders of psychopathology, his wife’s climates and thoughts? He shrugs to himself. He just does. He’s married to her. Slowly he pushes the sheet aside and stands up. He lumbers with effort—he feels like a circus bear—past the dresser, festooned with framed pictures of his daughter, past the rickety wooden chair on which he throws his clothes at night. He ambles in front of the window, pushes aside the curtains, and raises the windowshade. He lingers there, idly rearranging his penis inside his pajamas as he looks out at the linden tree and the lawn.

From the kitchen he hears his wife and daughter making noises. The wife is weaning the daughter, a difficult process for both of them. Food is being spooned into the daughter’s mouth, and this same food, projectile-spat, has appeared on the floor and the high chair. The husband at the window notices that his early-morning thoughts are in the passive voice. He is permitted to use the passive voice when he is sleepy.

The boy, Gordy Himmelman, is not there, outside, but he shoots himself anyway, randomly, airily, imaginatively, bringing himself back so that he can go away again. There he is, and isn’t, now, pointing the gun into himself and firing. Insubstantial bits of brains and skull fly up against the bark of the linden tree. How calm it is. How it goes on, destruction, into its own afterlife. Still, this life, his own, Saul’s, must be lived somehow. Saul shuffles into the bathroom for his shower, rubbing his eyes violently with the flat of his hand.

Under the cascading hot water, he cleans himself dutifully, dragging the washcloth layered with the antibacterial gold soap across his chest and arms and face, and at first his mind is pleasingly blank, until he thinks haphazardly, first of Gordy Himmelman, then of his mother and her teenaged boyfriend. He considers them as he washes his arms, doing his best to set up police crime-scene yellow tape around his imaginings, exiling them, forgetting them, ignoring them. It is like trying to ignore the enraged African elephant charging toward its victim. The unconscious never takes a vacation. Despite his regrets about the matter, his mother is a passionate woman.
Gordy Himmelman, his mother
—what choice does anyone have in the thoughts he is given to think? Still, he feels shame-soiled. He rinses himself off, pulls aside the shower curtain, and grabs a towel. This morning he will not bother to shave. Let the Saul-face be unfinished today.

In the kitchen, the phone is still off the hook, the hand-piece dangling down on its stretched coil wire from the wall-mounted phone to the floor. His daughter in her yellow-backed high chair with the teddy-bear headrest sits contentedly surrounded by the spatterings of breakfast, and she smiles when her father enters the room. “Hi, Princess,” he says, kissing her on the top of her head. Her hair is so delicate and fine, smelling of stardust and spun gold, Saul feels a sensual pleasure touching his lips to it.

She is so extravagantly new. Half of her is from him. The other half is from his wife. But the half and half add up to something entirely original. The husband remembers to kiss his wife also on the top of her head. “Good morning, Patsy,” he says to the woman he neglected to make love to half an hour earlier. For just a moment, he touches the tip of his tongue to her hair. She lifts her face to him, a smear of food on her cheek. “Oh, yes. Good morning, sweetheart,” she replies. She gives off a faint scent of dry saltine crackers and milk. The smile she has for him is quick, as is the kiss she gives him. “I love you,” she says, and after her husband tells her he loves her, he cleans her cheek with his index finger before sitting down at the table in front of the coffee cup she has placed there for him (cream, no sugar). Wearing a T-shirt and his pajama bottoms, he opens the paper. Perhaps it will be an ordinary day after all the extraordinariness of the previous day.

But, no: there on the goddamn fucking front page is a picture of his goddamn fucking front yard. In a separate column the editors have inserted a school picture of Gordy Himmelman, sporting a flattop. The boy looks dense and clueless and lunar and mean. He has the appearance of a convict-in-training. Leaning back in his chair, the husband considers the view out the kitchen window at this boy and the represented yard— his angle is different from that of the camera—and past it, to Whitefeather Road, when he notices that a car has slowed down so that its three occupants can point at the linden tree, where the blood is, though not on their side. The wife notes that her husband is observing some phenomenon or other, calculates the angle of his observation, and regards the scene outside the window. Gordy Himmelman, the deceased, stands vacantly out there. He is a little less dead this time than he was before.

“Gawkers,” she says calmly.

“Rubberneckers,” he says.

Patsy reaches out and grasps his hand. She caresses her husband’s knuckles and says she’s making some eggs for herself, would he like some, too? Scrambled? Yes, he would. She rises—she is still in her nightgown and slippers—and cracks four eggs into a frypan, adds some garlic powder, onion salt, some butter, a dash of milk, dash of Tabasco, paprika as it is dished up, a formula her husband likes and that she has learned from him. He prefers his scrambled eggs slightly runny, not . . . dried out. She wouldn’t like eggs cooked this way if she weren’t married to Saul. As she stands at the stove, her husband tells her that she is beautiful. He is good at this: he always compliments her spontaneously and with an air of sincerity and rarely with the hope of reward.

As she is mixing the ingredients in the frypan, before turning the burner on a low-medium heat, she says, “I wonder if there’ll be a funeral,” and her husband says, “I doubt it. He’s not dead enough to bury.”

It is fourteen minutes past eight.

At twenty-three minutes past ten, the wife finally puts the phone back on the hook, and within thirty seconds, it rings. She decides that she won’t answer it, no matter who the caller might be. But her decisions have little to do with what she actually does. In any case, a ringing telephone can sometimes sound like a command or a scream following any domestic catastrophe. That is how it sounds now. Her husband is still in his pajamas, eating a midmorning bowl of cereal, Emmy on his shoulder asleep and drooling. When she answers the phone, their daughter startles into wakefulness. The caller is Patsy’s friend Julie Dusenberg, asking if there’s anything she can do. Food? Aid and comfort? She and Patsy talk for a while, and after the call ends and Patsy puts the receiver back down, the phone rings again, more insistently this time, louder, like a heavier knock on the door. This time, the caller is one of Saul’s former students, Jeffrey Yonkey, wanting to say how sorry he is about the whole Gordy Himmelman thing. Patsy, surprised by the call, thanks him for his trouble, hangs up, and once again the phone starts to ring. The phone, today, is the other baby, crying and carrying on. There is nothing to do to quiet this baby except to talk softly to it.

Patsy picks up the receiver, and a voice says, “Hi, it’s Gordy.”

She waits to see whether the prankster has any other ideas of what to say or how to extend a cold and sadistic antic mischief using the voice of a day-old suicide, and because he doesn’t, because he’s a cruel and unimaginative juvenile, a long, slow, uneasy silence reigns until she delicately places her finger on the receiver hook, disconnecting him. Then she releases it. A faint dial tone hums into the air from the hanging phone. From the radio on the other side of the room, tuned to the local NPR affiliate, a waltz drifts absentmindedly into the air. What would it be? Ah, “The Merry Widow.” Franz Lehar. Now the baby is wide awake, and Saul has finished his cereal.

“I don’t like waltz music,” Patsy says, shaking her head. “Too much butter. Too much cholesterol. It’s just too . . . Viennese.”

“Who was that?” he asks, nodding in the direction of the telephone. He has moved into the living room and is holding Mary Esther’s arms up, so that she can practice her lurch-walking. She can stand on her own. So she is not a baby after all, but a toddler.

“Julie Dusenberg first. Then Jeffrey Yonkey. And then a crank caller,” Patsy tells him. “You want some more coffee? Should I brew up a new pot?”

“What’d he want, the crank caller?” He half-turns toward her, gives her a look from a half-closed eye, playing the role of the inspector.

“He was a . . . crank. Cranks don’t want anything,” she says.

“They want your attention,” Saul says. “What’d this one want?” He scoops his daughter up into his arms and twirls her around. The movement is festive, but the effect is one of great sadness.

“Some kid,” Patsy tells him. “Said he was Gordy.”

“More,” Emmy seems to say, making her parents smile.

Saul, for some reason, doesn’t seem particularly surprised. “Oh. Gordy. What’d
he
want?”

“
Saul,
I just told you.” She takes a long sip of her tea. “It was a pretender. He didn’t want anything. Said his name and then stopped. Oh.” She straightens up and smiles. “He asked us how we were doing.”

“That’s not like him. Gordy always wanted something. He never bothered to ask us how we were doing. He was too sullen for that.”

“Gordy’s dead, honey. He shot himself. Remember? This was . . . what I told you. An imposter. Just a kid.”

“Yup.”

“Come on, Saul. Let’s not get all creepy about this.”

“
I’m
not. I’m not being creepy. Besides, I’m not the one who called.” He gives her one of his odd housebroken smiles. These particular smiles always take the breath out of her. Nothing with Saul is unconditional when he is under stress; you always have to be slightly on your guard with him.

“It was just some kid,” Patsy says. “Some kid-who-was-not-Gordy. One of your disgruntled students. You know,” she says, “the woods are full of rural levity today.”

“I didn’t notice you laughing. Did you smile? Did you laugh?”

These are not friendly questions. They have a coldness that startles her. Maybe they should have made love after all. He feels her as she approaches him from behind, reaching around his chest, leaning her head against his back, standing there, just holding on, wanting him to anchor her. “Sometimes I think you’re the last humanist,” she mutters. “Sometimes I wonder how we’ll ever get on with things with you around.”